Mike Pence made it official today by filing his paperwork to launch his 2024 presidential bid. He will hold a public announcement event on Wednesday, in Des Moines, Iowa. Pence has close to a zero percent chance of winning the Republican nomination, with his chances for possibly reprising his role as vice president hovering at somewhat less than zero. There doesn't seem to be any viable path forward for Pence, which seemingly everyone but Pence can clearly see.

Pence won't be running a vanity campaign. Everyone already knows his name, after all. The only possible explanations for him believing he has a shot at the nomination are that he is either completely delusional, or perhaps chasing some "divinely-inspired" pipe dream. To put this another way, I could see Mike Pence thinking that God is thinking that Mike Pence should be the next president of the United States. Other than those two, though, there doesn't seem to be any explanation for Pence being in the race.

Pence, of course, occupies a unique position in the political firmament, for multiple reasons. He was Donald Trump's very loyal vice president. Pence excused and helped normalize all sorts of outrageous things Trump did or said while president. He was the ultimate loyal toady, in fact. If the 2020 election had gone differently, Pence would now be continuing to be Trump's loyal toady, heaping fawning praises upon him with every chance he got. And if Trump were still president and Pence still vice president, he might even actually now be leading the field of 2024 nominees (since Trump couldn't run again in this scenario), as Trump's anointed successor.

But all of Pence's loyalty will score him no points with Trump supporters now, however. This, of course, is because January 6th happened -- and as a result, hardcore MAGA voters now consider Pence to be not just a betrayer but actually treasonous. The mob of violent insurrectionists chanted: "Hang Mike Pence!" as they rampaged through the hallways of the U.S. Capitol, and they had even brought along what certainly looked like a fully-functional gallows, which they had at the ready right outside the building. If events that day had gone just slightly differently, Pence might now be a martyr to democracy. That is not an exaggeration or hyperbole. Pence could very well have wound up lynched on that dark day. For many Trump supporters, these feelings of rage and betrayal have not somehow faded away, either. Pence is not held in very high esteem by the MAGA base, and that is putting it as politely as possible.

So it truly is a mystery why Pence is even bothering to run for president. He obviously looks in the mirror each morning and sees a future president looking back out at him. This is a mental affliction which strikes virtually everybody who serves as vice president, to be fair. It is not in any way uncommon. However, Pence doesn't realize that the rest of the country would see in that mirror Caspar Milquetoast instead of a future president. I can think of many words to describe Mike Pence (boring, robotic, personality-challenged, uncharismatic, holier-than-thou, insufferable), but "presidential" isn't even remotely one of them. Most Americans remember the fly that landed on his head during his last vice presidential debate more fondly than they remember Pence's performance, to put this another way.

For the sake of discussion, here is the only possible path to victory I can even come up with for Pence: first, Donald Trump either drops dead of cheeseburger overdose or some other self-inflicted cause, taking him permanently out of the race. Anything short of this -- Trump facing ever-more-serious legal charges against him, some scandal breaks that even GOP voters might care about, whatever -- would likely only serve to bolster Trump's standing among the Republican electorate. Trump is a master at a very specific piece of doublethink: that he is a virile manly champion of all things GOP voters care about, and that he is also somehow the eternal victim of some grand conspiracy against him. Most people couldn't pull off a "strongman/victim" persona, but Trump has somehow managed this feat. So any scandals that Trump gets caught up in (whether old or new) would just reinforce his: "They're out to get me!" cries and would likely produce a "rally 'round the flag" effect -- as, indeed, his first arraignment in New York already did. So Pence can't count on Trump somehow self-immolating (neither can anyone else in the race, just to be clear). Trump is the ultimate Teflon Don -- nothing ever seems to stick to him, in the eyes of his supporters. Only death could absolutely remove Trump from the equation (and, just to be clear, I am not in any way endorsing such a thing, as I have a long-standing rule against ever speaking of the death or assassination of politicians in any sort of positive light).

Short of this, however, Pence wouldn't have a prayer. Even if Trump did disappear from the race, Pence still likely wouldn't have a prayer. He will be running hard to win Iowa on the strength of his evangelical bona fides, but there are others in the race also courting this slice of the GOP electorate (Tim Scott, most notably) who have much more personality and/or charisma and who were not so directly involved in any of the events of January 6th.

Pence, like many of the other Republicans running, is attempting to walk the tightrope of mostly supporting Trump's presidency and speaking of him very positively, but also trying to distance himself from certain aspects of Trumpism. With Pence, the breaking point was January 6th. He refused Trump's entreaties to somehow magically interpret the Constitution into saying Pence had the power to just toss out certain states' Electoral College votes and declare the race had been won by Trump. That's precisely what not just Donald Trump wanted but also what the crowd who attacked the Capitol was demanding. They didn't start chanting: "Hang Mike Pence!" until the news broke that Pence had publicly disavowed Trump's novel interpretation of his powers that day and would indeed be fulfilling his constitutional duty. Pence still doesn't see eye-to-eye with Trump about this day, obviously. But Pence still always speaks of everything else Trump managed to do while in office using the term "the Trump/Pence administration," to not-so-subtly take some of the credit himself. Again, to be fair, this is an affliction which most vice presidents running for president display (Joe Biden certainly loved reminding people of his ties to Barack Obama, for instance).

All of this tightrope-walking might have worked a lot better if Trump wasn't also running. But he is. So the 2020 election is not going to somehow gauzily fade into the background in the minds of GOP voters, it is still going to be front and center for Trump and his supporters. Meaning Pence will have to speak about the issue over and over again while campaigning, instead of somehow moving on from it.

But back to our hypothetical path to victory for Pence. Even if Trump disappears from the race, it's really hard to see Pence catching fire and leading the GOP field. He'll be splitting his own base (evangelicals) with other candidates, he is not charismatic in the slightest, and the base voters are not looking for some quiet gravitas, they are instead looking to be entertained. Pence is no entertainer, to put it as politely as possible.

Up until now, Pence has been running a pretty strong third in all the polling. Doubtlessly, this is one of the biggest reasons why Pence is confident he's got a shot at victory. But in the first place it is a very distant third -- down in the single digits, while Trump and Ron DeSantis are far beyond that. And secondly, Pence has benefitted from name recognition far more than any candidate other than DeSantis and Trump. Other than Trump, Pence is the only one who has been included in every poll listed on the RealClearPolitics GOP race's polling average page. The only ones who come close to that mark are DeSantis and Nikki Haley (Haley announced very early on, which assured that her name would be included in all the polls from that point on). More people started this whole cycle knowing who Pence was than either DeSantis or Haley, as well. All of which helps explain Pence pulling anywhere from five to seven percent in the earliest of polling.

Even so, Haley's already made several temporarily-successful runs at beating Pence out for third place. Curiously enough, one of these has just happened. In the past few weeks, right before everyone expected his presidential announcement, Pence has sank below Haley in the polls, pulling only 3.8 percent currently, to Haley's 4.4. That's not exactly the trajectory a candidate likes to see, heading into the big announcement. But to be fair, there has been no new polling since May 22nd, so nobody knows what is really going on as the campaign season truly gets underway.

Pence is obviously counting on Iowa to be key to his campaign. He is announcing there, rather than in his home state of Indiana. He will be assiduously courting Iowa evangelicals and other religiously-minded GOP voters there. But he's got a long way to go. In the few recent Iowa polls that exist, Pence is also trailing Haley in fourth place. Even in the friendliest of early-voting states, Pence is barely registering.

Mike Pence, having been vice president, is a nationally-known politician. His campaign will get lots of coverage on the strength of this fact alone. He does not have to introduce himself to America. He does not have to build name recognition (as candidates Vivek Ramaswamy, Doug Burgum, and others have had to or will have to do). Everyone knows who Mike Pence is. Normally this is a big asset for a presidential candidate, but I have to wonder whether in Pence's case it is actually his biggest problem.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant